I want to begin a short series of comments, keyed off of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism.
As Goldberg demonstrates repeatedly, fascism was a phenomenon of the left, and the ones who were fascinated by it in this country were what we call progressives. Simplifying only just a little bit, the differences between communism and fascism were the differences between international socialism and national socialism. They were struggling with one another because there were two of them and only enough leftist oxygen in the room for one. The fact that they came into conflict no more means that they occupied opposite ends of a mythical political spectrum than the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky meant that.
The comments critical of Goldberg that followed my initial post on this demonstrate that those who made them would probably enjoy Goldberg’s book very much. He covers the fundamental issues thoroughly — and in principle he agrees that the state wants to keep us in a perpetual state of crisis so that we can all be managed better. Now I would want to apply this to the war on terror more than he does, but I have little doubt but that he would grant the point once made.
Too often, political discourse descends to a level cultivated by kids on the playground. If one kid asserts that all second graders are stupid, the natural response of the second graders is to maintain, no, uh uh, that no second graders are stupid. In other words, one indefensible assertion is soon competing with another one. But (for those who remember the square of opposition from logic class), the contradictory position to All P are Q is not No P are Q, but rather Some P are not Q. Some second graders (meaning, at least one) are not stupid.
We fall into this trap all the time. When, according to our color-coded handlers, every bed has a Muslim terrorist under it, it is a very foolish response to say that no bed has a Muslim terrorist under it. Because a number of our liberties have been eroded in the name of the “war on terror” (a fact I have a hard time believing that Goldberg would deny), it does not follow that there is no such thing as a terrorism which threatens us. We are in a situation which is much more complicated than that. What we want are people who understand the principles at stake, not people who have chosen up sides.
I mentioned in the comments on the previous post that I had subscribed to The American Conservative when it first came out, but I let my subscription lapse because of the strange bedfellows they found themselves with. Any foe of my current foe is accorded a strange new respect, whether that person is someone like Norman Mailer (because of his opposition to the war), or the French (because of their opposition to all things Bush), and so on. In short, on the principles of true conservatism I think (after reading this book) that Goldberg understands many of them better than Pat Buchanan, even though I think Buchanan was right about the war.
As an aside, I also subscribed to E. Michael Jones’ Culture Wars because I have really appreciated a number of his books. I let that lapse also after seeing a perfidious Jew on the cover of about ten successive issues. Intelligent and gifted people wind up in cul de sacs like this because they choose up sides instead of working through the principles involved. In short, I believe that Goldberg understands that the state is not my friend, even when it is doing something I agree with. But many populist paleos lose their suspicions when the state takes the “right position.”
And I say this as someone who has no sympathy for the neo-con project. I simply understand that there are principled conservatives that have been clustered with the neo-cons, and that there are a number of people clustered with the paleos who don’t understand those principles.